back in my map era, we're ukrainemaxxing right now
Declarations of the imminent doom of Ukraine are a news megathread specialty, and this is not what I am doing here - mostly because I'm convinced that whenever we do so, the war extends another three months to spite us. Ukraine has been in an essentially apocalyptic crisis for over a year now after the failure of the 2023 counteroffensive, unable to make any substantial progress and resigned to merely being a persistent nuisance (and arms market!) as NATO fights to the last Ukrainian. In this context, predicting a terminal point is difficult, as things seem to always be going so badly that it's hard to understand how and why they fight on. In every way, Ukraine is a truly shattered country, barely held together by the sheer combined force of Western hegemony. And that hegemony is weakening.
I therefore won't be giving any predictions of a timeframe for a Ukrainian defeat, but the coming presidency of Trump is a big question mark for the conflict. Trump has talked about how he wishes for the war to end and for a deal to be made with Putin, but Trump also tends to change his mind on an issue at least three or four times before actually making a decision, simply adopting the position of who talked to him last. And, of course, his ability to end the war might be curtailed by a military-industrial complex (and various intelligence agencies) that want to keep the money flowing.
The alignment of the US election with the accelerating rate of Russian gains is pretty interesting, with talk of both escalation and de-escalation coinciding - the former from Biden, and the latter from Trump. Russia very recently performed perhaps the single largest aerial attack of Ukraine of the entire war, striking targets across the whole country with missiles and drones from various platforms. In response, the US is talking about allowing Ukraine to hit long-range targets in Russia (but the strategic value of this, at this point, seems pretty minimal).
Additionally, Russia has made genuine progress in terms of land acquisition. We aren't talking about endless and meaningless battles over empty fields anymore. Some of the big Ukrainian strongholds that we've been spending the last couple years speculating over - Chasiv Yar, Kupiansk, Orikhiv - are now being approached and entered by Russian forces. The map is actually changing now, though it's hard to tell as Ukraine is so goddamn big.
Attrition has finally paid off for Russia. An entire generation of Ukrainians has been fed into the meat grinder. Recovery will take, at minimum, decades - more realistically, the country might be permanently ruined, until that global communist revolution comes around at least. And they could have just made a fucking deal a month into the war.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Some World Cup qualifying news from the best continent, Asia. Japan continue their rampage as they beat China today, while Saudi Arabia continue their woeful form with a loss against Indonesia. Iraq beat Oman away, big result for Iraq. Iraq's chances for a first World Cup since 1986 look very good after Jordan's fumble vs Kuwait. Uzbekistan look set for their first World Cup appearence after beating Based Korea today, while Bad Korea drew against Palestine. My projection of qualified teams after this round is: Iran, Uzbekistan, South Korea, Iraq, Japan, Australia. Saudi Arabia should make it through the playoffs, but they look like shit. UAE have picked some nice form recently, so I think they will be the last team to make it from Asia.
boooooooooo
I'm glad they only lost 1-3 instead of 0-7 like last time.
Is China really that bad at football? Both Koreas are good at it.
China are so bad considering how good they're in individual sports and they're just good at doing successful long-term projects, but they just can't seem to figure out football for some reason. They're better than North Korea, but South Korea are many levels ahead. Right now I'd say that the big 5 (Japan, South Korea, Iran, Australia and Saudi) are all better, then Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, UAE and Uzbekistan are all comfortably better. They're barely top 15 tbh, even smaller nations like Bahrain and Kuwait are as good as China. Even rising nations such as the likes of Tajikistan and Indonesia are now on China's level.
They need to get their players to play in the top 5 European leagues, it's the only way to compete at the highest level on the international stage nowadays. Domestic leagues just don't have high enough quality football to develop and improve players. Iron sharpens iron at the end of the day.
The quality of the academies and the stability of the domestic league also matters a lot. Saudi regularly makes the World Cup with only domestic players, while Qatar won two Asian Cups in a row with only domestic players. Chinese academies are simply not producing decent players, and their league has financial meltdowns almost every single season. Something in their academy system is simply not working, statistically they should be producing at least one good player that can cut it even in a lesser European league. Every single top 15 Asian nation has at least one good player that makes it out, China can't seem to reach that stage. The Chinese League isn't worse than the Iraqi League for example, but Iraq continues producing way better players even with the instability in the country.
Yeah the quality of the domestic league does still matter of course, to give talents a place to showcase their skills in the first place. And in every continental competition that's not the Euros or Copa America, you can get very far using players from your domestic league. South Africa came third in the last AFCON using mostly players that play in South Africa, for example. But the Chinese domestic league has made many mistakes (chasing washed up players from top leagues on high wages before even building a good base, for example), and their academies can't produce good talents.
Their domestic league clubs are still having financial issues? Thought they put in reforms a few years ago to try and fix that.
What is the Chinese national sport?